Blast from the Past: A Novel (Kinky Friedman Novels) - Hardcover

Friedman, Kinky

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684803798 ISBN 13: 9780684803791

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

A prequel to the now infamous Roadkill reveals how Kinky Friedman, the sleazy country music singer, became Kinky Friedman, sleazy detective extraordinaire, plus other secrets including where the Village Irregulars came from. 60,000 first printing. Tour.

About this title

About the Author

Kinky Friedman lives in a little green trailer in a little green valley deep in the heart of Texas. There are about ten million imaginary horses in the valley and quite often they gallop around Kinky's trailer, encircling the author in a terrible, ever-tightening carousel of death. Even as the hooves are pounding around him in the darkest night, one can hear, almost in counterpoint, the frail, consumptive, ascetic novelist tip-tip-tapping away on the last typewriter in Texas. In such fashion he has turned out eleven novels, including Roadkill, The Love Song of J. Edgar Hoover, God Bless John Wayne, Armadillos & Old Lace, and Elvis, Jesus & Coca-Cola. A pet armadillo called Dilly, a small black dog named Mr. Magoo, and two cats -- Dr. Scat and Lady Argyle -- can sometimes be found sleeping with Kinky in his narrow, monastic, Father Damien-like bed.

Reviews

The 11th adventure from Texas-based Friedman, a former New York City musician who writes about band-player, amateur detective Kinky Friedman (Roadkill; The Love Song of Edgar J. Hoover; etc.), will delight early fans with its return to Greenwich Village and the Kinkster's sleuthing roots. In this prequel, which starts in the present, Kinky is hit on the head while walking up to the apartment of the elusive and beautiful Stephanie DuPont. Suddenly it's the late 1970s and Kinky is meeting his sidekick crew, the Village Irregulars, for the first time: Steve Rambam, Mike McGovern and Pete Myers. Larry "Ratso" Sloman (Kinky's own version of Dr. Watson) suggests that, since Kinky has a convoluted mind, he should become a detective. The detecting game begins when activist Abbie Hoffman comes in from the cold and crashes at Kinky's apartment. Abbie seems somewhat paranoid, but perhaps with reason. When the apartment gets blown up, Kinky starts down the sleuthing road, trying to deduce who might be stalking Abbie. Or is it Kinky himself that someone is after? Kinky says his old friend Abbie is "just one of the guys... who invented the sixties," but in this story Abbie is also a tragic, deluded symbol of how 1960s idealism was marginalized and ultimately ignored. This hearkening back is one of Friedman's best efforts, gathering amateur sleuthing, an eccentric cast and his trademark raunchy, irreverent over-the-top humor into an hilarious mix.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

After ten inimitably ribald adventures, it's about time that rocker/raconteur Friedman served up an account of how he became a shamus in the first place, and so his magic carpet takes us back to 1979. Kinky, crashing with his friend Ratso Sloman, is quietly trying to consummate his relationship with new friend Judy on Ratso's couch when some comments from a couple of passersby alert him to the attractions of becoming a private dick. In no time at all, the Kinkster's got himself two cases: the mystery of Judy's old lover Tom, shot down over Vietnam, buried with full military honors, and now turned up again, she insists, in the Village; and the question of why somebody is trying to shoot aging radical Abbie Hoffman, the man who invented the '60s. It's clear from this backward glance that Kinky was always a natural. As he goes through the motions of meeting such Vandam Street familiars as reporter Mike McGovern, rabbinical student Steve Rambam, and Mort Cooperman, NYPD, he floats through the introductions, and through the mystery itself, in the same Zen-like stupor you'd swear he'd taken years to perfect. En route to solving the case via his trademark method, breaking and entering (Abbie's lawyer, William Kunstler, is the target this time), Kinky proves once again that no joke is too old, too low, or too irrelevant to work in somehow. By the time he pulls the whole train into the station, the '60s are definitely over. Fully the equal of Road Kill (1997), though, as usual with Kinky, the hardest thing to detect is the plot. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Other than its opening line, "Call me Kinky," Friedman's latest bears little resemblance to Melville's greatest novel, unless obsession with dick size constitutes a literary allusion. Rather, Friedman fancies himself a contemporary Sherlock Holmes, complete with his own substance-abuse problems (Kinky calls his fix "Peruvian marching powder") and a quest for his very own Watson. This time, a blow to the head sends the "canny, crepuscular, cat-loving crime-solver" into a flashback of his disco days, when he crashed on his pal Ratso's couch on Prince Street in SoHo and had a weekly gig with his band the Shalom Retirement Village People. His trip back to the '70s enables him to recall his first case and retell how some of his merry associates, now known as the Village Irregulars, gained that status. It also allows him to present Abbie Hoffman in a cameo and to break into the law offices of William Kunstler. Kinky's usual, curmudgeonly commentary also enlivens this surprisingly sentimental, though not very inspired, nostalgia trip. Benjamin Segedin

This prequel to Roadkill explains how the Kinkster became a sleazy detective.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Part One: The Present Tense

Chapter One

Call me Kinky.

It's not my true Christian name, of course, but then, I'm not a true Christian. If you don't believe me, maybe I can sell you the bridge of my nose. For, indeed, what true Christian, with Sunday-morning church bells ringing cacophonously all around him, would prefer sitting in a cold, drafty loft one floor below a lesbian dance class, puffing a cigar, sipping an espresso, and playing chess with a cat? It was a slow game, but I'd seen slower.

"Are you going to make a move," I said to the cat, "or are you just going to sit there?"

The cat, of course, said nothing. Nor did she deign to make a move. She was one of that maddening breed of finicky, meticulously conservative players who now and again cause you to want to reach across the table and yank their whiskers. There are, however, very few female chess players of merit in this world. If you have the good fortune to stumble across one, you always make allowances.

Outside the kitchen window winter had entirely enveloped the city, white as Rosinante, cold as the ashes of Jean Harlow's honeymoon. Harry Houdini's ghost, apparently, had placed Vandam Street under a trance. For a moment it seemed like it could be any other city block along the parade route of life's charade. For a moment it almost made a country singer-turned-private investigator wonder if he could solve the mystery of what in the hell he was doing here in the first place.

One of the many things New York City is not conducive to is a peaceful game of chess. Now, as the cat and I stared silently at the board, the small wooden pieces dissolving dreamily into dear, dead, dusty friends, a new and extremely unpleasant noise intruded itself upon the already tedious clamor of the church bells. A horn was honking in a somewhat irregular series of very loud, very long blasts. Like love, like trouble, like the extended stay of a hideous housepest, just when you thought it was over for good, it started up again.

"That tears it," I said to the cat. "I doubt whether even Van Gogh could masturbate under these conditions. However, through the power of Sherlockian deductive reasoning, I win now describe for you the nature of the villain who is creating such a repellent racket."

The cat looked at me with traffic-light eyes. Ever-changing. Now yellow. Now green. Now blinking, it seemed to me, somewhat doubtfully.

"The horn itself does not seem to have the dull, pedestrian timbre of the average horn on the average four-wheeled penis that speeds along the streets and sometimes the sidewalks of New York. Nor does it have the deep, resonant foghorn quality of a large vehicle -- for instance, a garbage truck. Today being Sunday, we can exclude garbage trucks altogether. You can't count on them to pick up the trash on any day, but on Sunday, like all good little church-workers, the garbage trucks rest. Unfortunately, most of them like to rest on Vandam Street."

The cat looked at me with pity in her eyes. I ignored her gaze and continued my calm, scientific analysis. Sherlockian deduction leaves no room for human emotions. Just as I was starting to speak the horn, an earsplitting, high-pitched, endless urban fart, sounded again.

"Twenty-seven seconds," I said. "Quite a singular occurrence if I'm not mistaken. The four-wheeled penis is no doubt new, expensive, and probably of foreign manufacture. Very likely driven by a detestable young person who obviously is not of a religious bent. The driver could not be incapacitated. Surely he'd have been mugged or assisted by this time, so an epileptic seizure or heart attack is out of the question. We can also rule out an electronic alarm on a parked four-wheeled penis. The fartings are too sustained and at intervals of too much irregularity. That last blast was thirteen seconds."

The cat stared at me very possibly in the same uncomprehending way Van Gogh's cat had stared at him during the last years of his life, when the two of them had shared the same padded cell in Dr. Gachet's mental hospital. Like Van Gogh's cat, my cat probably thought I belonged in wig city as well. He must be crazy, she no doubt figured. Why else would anybody become obsessed with a car honking out on the street when they could be playing chess with a cat? Sherlockian dicturn, of course, places very little stock in the whimsical wanderings of females or cats in general.

"Since it is Sunday and the traffic is light, the young woman in the foreign car is most likely trying to get the attention of someone in an upstairs loft or apartment not equipped with an intercom or buzzer to let her into the building."

At this point I got up from my chair and began pacing the living room of the loft. Back and forth I paced, puffing the cigar, studiously avoiding getting too close to the Vandam-side windows. My pacing was punctuated at intermittent intervals by extended, highly irritating horn blasts.

"How do I know it's a woman, you ask?" I said rhetorically to the cat, as I stopped pacing and turned dramatically toward the kitchen table.

Much to my Cheshire chagrin, the cat was now lying on its back on the table, sound asleep with all four paws in the air. When you blind the world with science there will always be those perverse enough to close their eyes. Nonetheless, I plodded on, shouting at the slumbering feline like a madman in a play.

"How do I know it's a woman behind the wheel? Because a man hits the horn in a threatening, rhythmic, staccato fashion, like a native of the Congo beating on his bongo. A similarly highly agitato woman takes a quite different approach. She leans on the horn with her whole neurotic, love-scarred life. So a young woman in an expensive foreign car is making this ungodly commotion on the very day that most of the world regards as God's day of rest. Fortunately, we are not most of the world."

Ready to test my powers of Sherlockian deductive reasoning, I gently scooped up the mildly protesting cat and together we walked to the kitchen window. I set the cat, who was now quite peeved, on the windowsill, and boldly gazed directly down on Vandam Street.

A shiny black Porsche with a vanity license plate that read EXCESS was parked just to the left of the building. As I opened the window, a young, blond, drop-dead-gorgeous woman unfolded her long legs and stepped out of the Porsche. I'd remembered reading in my National Enquirer that Jerry Seinfeld owned twelve Porsches. That was the definition of pathetic, I recalled thinking at the time. I didn't even like people who drove one Porsche. Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and I was gawking at one of them now.

As the young woman disdainfully skirted a parked garbage truck, two small dogs on leashes became visible to the cat and myself. A brief moue of distaste crossed the countenance of the cat. I watched the dogs, the red high-heels, the expensive-looking leather briefcase she carried, and the cocksure, sensuous way she carried everything else about her. There was no mistaking it. She was very familiar-looking. Of course, you never completely forget someone who's broken your heart.

Now the dogs were yipping and yapping. Now the snowflakes were falling gently upon her red stilettoes. Now she was laughing carelessly and smiling a stunning snow-blind smile that sailed up four stories right into my unfurnished eyes. Now, like a man in a trance, I walked to the refrigerator, picked up the little Negro puppet head from its perch on top. It had a colorful parachute attached to it and the key to the building in its smiling, stoic mouth. I walked back to the window again and looked down at the beautiful woman below. A young girl, really. Almost kindred spirits we were. The only difference between us was that she loved a little black Porsche and I loved a little black puppet head.

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0684803798
• ISBN 13: 9780684803791
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256